People v. Claudio

• Decision Date: 21 December 1993
• Citation: 83 N.Y.2d 76,629 N.E.2d 384,607 N.Y.S.2d 912
• Parties: , 629 N.E.2d 384 The PEOPLE of the State of New York, Respondent, v. Angel CLAUDIO, Appellant.
• Court: New York Court of Appeals Court of Appeals

Page 912

607 N.Y.S.2d 912

83 N.Y.2d 76, 629 N.E.2d 384

The PEOPLE of the State of New York, Respondent, v. Angel CLAUDIO, Appellant.

Court of Appeals of New York.

Dec. 21, 1993.

Proskauer Rose Goetz & Mendelsohn, New York City (William E. Hellerstein, of counsel), for appellant.

Richard A. Brown, Dist. Atty. of Queens County, Kew Gardens (John M. Castellano, Barry A. Schwartz and Steven J. Chananie, of counsel), for respondent.

OPINION OF THE COURT

LEVINE, Judge.

In the spring of 1980, defendant was indicted for the murder of a 16-year-old high school student. The indictment was based principally on defendant's own inculpatory statements, which had been made to the District Attorney's representative upon the advice of defendant's retained attorney. In 1983, this Court affirmed the denial of defendant's motion to suppress these inculpatory statements after rejecting appellate counsel's contention that they were the result of a violation of defendant's Sixth Amendment right to the effective assistance of counsel (People v. Claudio, 59 N.Y.2d 556, 466 N.Y.S.2d 271, 453 N.E.2d 500 [Claudio I ]. Defendant appears before us once again following a ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit that a writ of habeas corpus should be granted and defendant released from State custody "unless the state affords [defendant] an opportunity to present [his] Article 1, § 6 state law claim to the New York Court of Appeals" (Claudio v. Scully, 982 F.2d 798, 806). We now hold, as we did in Claudio I, that the ineffectiveness of defendant's first retained counsel affords no basis for reversal of his conviction.

We accept the premise, which was shared by every court that has considered this case, that retained counsel's conduct in advising defendant to confess to the police--at a time when there was no concrete evidence against him and no possibility of a plea offer--represented gross professional incompetence (see, Claudio I, supra, 59 N.Y.2d, at 560, 466 N.Y.S.2d 271, 453 N.E.2d 500; 85 A.D.2d 245, 251, 447 N.Y.S.2d 972; Claudio v. Scully, 982 F.2d 798, 802, supra). The dispositive issue, therefore, is whether our holdings that the State constitutional right to counsel indelibly attaches when a criminal suspect invokes that right by obtaining an attorney (see, People v. Skinner, 52 N.Y.2d 24, 436 N.Y.S.2d 207, 417 N.E.2d 501; People v. Hobson, 39 N.Y.2d 479, 384 N.Y.S.2d 419, 348 N.E.2d 894; People v. Arthur, 22 N.Y.2d 325, 292 N.Y.S.2d 663, 239 N.E.2d 537) imply a constitutional State guarantee of effective assistance of counsel when an attorney enters a case on a suspect's behalf. We conclude that, except in most unusual circumstances not present here, the State is not charged with the responsibility of guaranteeing effective legal representation upon the entry of counsel at the preaccusatory, investigatory stage of a criminal matter, i.e., before the commencement of formal adversarial judicial criminal proceedings.

Defendant acknowledges that all our relevant precedents have involved some law enforcement official's disregard of or interference with the attorney-client relationship by interrogation of the defendant in the absence of retained or assigned counsel. However, as we held in Claudio I, in the instant case, the prosecutor and the police scrupulously honored defendant's relationship with his retained attorney. Furthermore, defendant has not cited any case declaring a State constitutional right to effective assistance of counsel at the preaccusatory stage of a criminal investigation. However, defendant argues that logically, once his State right to counsel indelibly attaches, the panoply of constitutional guarantees associated with the right to counsel spring into being. Defendant supports this deduction largely with the statement in People v. Skinner (supra) that the bar to an effective waiver of the right to counsel in the absence of a suspect's attorney "simply recognizes the right and need of an individual to have a competent advocate at his or her side in dealing with the State" (52 N.Y.2d at 29, 436 N.Y.S.2d 207, 417 N.E.2d 501 [emphasis supplied].

In our view, Skinner and its predecessors (supra) are inapposite to this case. Our holdings that the right to counsel indelibly attaches upon the entry of counsel at the preaccusatory stage involve different constitutional concerns and interests from the guarantee of effective legal representation. Moreover, any implication that the language employed in Skinner to which defendant cites was intended broadly to extend the right to effective legal assistance to the preaccusatory stage, is dispelled by the more specific effective representation cases decided by this Court subsequent to Skinner. ^*

To be sure, we have developed a somewhat different test for ineffective assistance of counsel under article I, § 6 of the New York Constitution from that employed by the Supreme Court in applying the Sixth Amendment (compare, People v. Baldi, 54 N.Y.2d 137, 147, 444 N.Y.S.2d 893, 429 N.E.2d 400 supra, with Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S. 668, 687, 104 S.Ct. 2052, 2064, 80 L.Ed.2d 674). Nonetheless, the basic purposes and constitutional interests at stake under both constitutional guarantees of an adequate legal defense in a criminal case are the same: (1) the preservation of our unique adversarial system of criminal justice, the underlying presupposition of which " 'is that partisan advocacy on both sides of a case will best promote the ultimate objective that the guilty be convicted and the innocent go free' " (United States v. Cronic, 466 U.S. 648, 655, 104 S.Ct. 2039, 2045, 80 L.Ed.2d 657 [quoting Herring v. New York, 422 U.S. 853, 862, 95 S.Ct. 2550, 2555, 45 L.Ed.2d 593]; and (2) the correlative necessity to provide a defendant with an advocate sufficiently competent to insure "fairness in the adversary criminal process" (United States v. Morrison, 449 U.S. 361, 364, 101 S.Ct. 665, 667, 66 L.Ed.2d 564 [emphasis supplied]. "[T]he right to the effective assistance of counsel is recognized not for its own sake, but because of the effect it has on the ability of the accused to receive a fair trial" (United States v. Cronic, supra, 466 U.S., at 658, 104 S.Ct., at 2046). These concerns are subsumed in our adoption of the standard of meaningful representation for the fulfillment of the State's own constitutional responsibility to insure effective assistance of counsel to the criminally accused (People v. Baldi, supra, 54 N.Y.2d at 147, 444 N.Y.S.2d 893, 429 N.E.2d 400). Moreover, the guarantee exists independent of any prosecutorial or judicial misconduct interfering with defense counsel's effectiveness (Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S., at 686, 104 S.Ct., at 2063, supra).

The foregoing intrinsic premise and purposes of the constitutional right to effective representation--as the bulwark of our adversary system of criminal justice and an absolute necessity to achieve fairness to the accused within that adversary system--imply that the guarantee of effective assistance of counsel is not triggered until adversarial judicial criminal proceedings have been instituted against a defendant, and the Federal cases so hold. Thus, in Kirby v. Illinois, 406 U.S. 682, 92 S.Ct. 1877, 32 L.Ed.2d 411 the Supreme Court held that no rights under the Sixth Amendment accrue until the commencement of the criminal action.

"The initiation of judicial criminal proceedings is far from a mere formalism. It is the starting point of our whole system of adversary criminal justice. For it is only then that the government has committed itself to prosecute, and only then that the adverse positions of government and defendant have solidified. It is then that a defendant finds himself faced with the prosecutorial forces of organized society, and immersed in the intricacies of substantive and procedural criminal law. It is this point, therefore, that marks the commencement of the 'criminal prosecutions' to which alone the explicit guarantees of the Sixth Amendment are applicable" (id., at 689-690, 92 S.Ct., at 1882).

The language of our State Constitution also suggests that the guarantee of effective assistance of counsel does not arise until the commencement of adversarial judicial proceedings: "In any trial in any court whatever the party accused shall be allowed to appear and defend in person and with counsel as in civil actions" (N.Y. Const. art. I, § 6 [emphasis supplied]. Thus, it has been held that, generally, it is only at arraignment immediately after the start of judicial criminal proceedings that an indigent defendant first becomes entitled to the assignment of counsel (see, Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S. at 685, 104 S.Ct., at 2063, supra; see also, People v. Samuels, 49 N.Y.2d 218, 223, 424 N.Y.S.2d 892, 400 N.E.2d 1344).

Our cases holding that a suspect's preaccusatory right to counsel indelibly attaches when retained or assigned counsel assumes representational responsibility do not implicate the same purposes and concerns as underlie the constitutional guarantee of effective assistance of counsel. Our rationale in those cases for applying an indelible right to counsel at the preaccusatory stage is essentially prophylactic, to prevent official overreaching and to insure that any waiver of the right to counsel is untainted. Thus, we have explained that a criminal suspect, by invoking the right to counsel, expresses a lack of competence to deal with law enforcement authorities without legal advice and, hence, needs the same protection before waiving the right to counsel (People v. Cunningham, 49 N.Y.2d 203, 209, 424 N.Y.S.2d 421, 400 N.E.2d 360). And, in People v. Hobson, 39 N.Y.2d 479, 384 N.Y.S.2d 419, 348 N.E.2d 894, supra, we emphasized that "the presence of counsel is a more effective safeguard against an involuntary waiver of counsel than a mere written or oral warning in the absence of counsel" (id., at 484, 384 N.Y.S.2d 419, 348 N.E.2d 894...